Know Your Enemy21 Jan 2025

The Entrepreneurial Ethic & How We Work Today (w/ Erik Baker)

This is a fascinating episode that takes up thinkers that the podcast has covered before—the Koch brothers, Austrian economists like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, and others—but from a different angle: that of the entrepreneurial work ethic. Historian Erik Baker's superb book on the topic, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, offers a genuinely absorbing tour of this most American of ideologies, one that has emerged again and again, in various guises and in different circumstances, to reconcile workers to the contradictions of the U.S. economy, especially the shortage of jobs that has come with its many "innovations" and changes. What are the historical and even spiritual sources of the entrepreneurial work ethic, and what ideological needs does it serve for bosses and managers? Why is it so seductive to Americans? How does it relate to deeply American impulses relating to responsibility, guilt, and shame? In what ways did the entrepreneurial work ethic serve U.S. aims during the Cold War? And how has it endured in our age of Silicon Valley tech overlords and Donald Trump, entrepreneur, being re-elected? We take up these questions and many more in this rich conversation.

Sources:

Erik Baker, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (2025)

— "Fairytale in the Supermarket," The Baffler, Jan 14, 2025

Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952)

Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, (2021)

Listen again:

"Bomb Power" (w/ Erik Baker), Dec 19, 2023

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to all of our premium episodes!

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(273)

The Left Ascendant in New York City [Teaser]

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. In this episode we break down the results from last week's Democratic primaries in New York City, which saw cand...

29 Jun 2min

Pope Leo XIV's 'Magnifica humanitas' (w/ Jack Hanson)

As promised, here is our episode about Pope Leo XIV's recent encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, in which he brings to bear Catholic social teaching on the perils of artificial intelligence and what they...

22 Jun 1h 36min

Tucker Carlson and the Anti-Israel Right (w/ Peter Beinart) [Teaser]

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. Author and Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart returns to "Know Your Enemy" to discuss Tucker Carlson'...

15 Jun 3min

Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History (w/ Matt Dinan)

Pull up a chair and pour yourself a drink! For the third installment in our occasional series on important conservative books, or important books written by or embraced by conservatives, we take up Le...

9 Jun 2h 26min

Know Your Enemy, Live! (w/ Mike Duncan) [Teaser]

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. Last month, on May 14th, we were joined by nearly 800 listeners in New York City for the first ever Know Your En...

1 Jun 3min

Military Education and American Manhood (w/ Jasper Craven)

In this episode we have a conversation with reporter Jasper Craven about his new book, God Forgives, Brothers Don't: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood, which is a...

26 Mai 1h 32min

Even More Listener Questions, Answered [Teaser]

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. As always, listeners asked more mailbag questions than we could respond to in one episode, so we continue answer...

18 Mai 5min

The Seven Year Anniversary Mailbag Episode

Not only was May 6th the seven-year anniversary of Know Your Enemy, an occasion to celebrate your support of our work, but it's been nearly a year since we last opened the mailbag and answered listene...

11 Mai 1h 16min